An email I sent out to my angry supplier

All client servicing industry has always been a shit job. We try our best and give best suggestion yet we also have to give client the freedom to turn everything upside down. We can always counter propose or argue about our points all we want but ultimately the paying person has the final say. It sucks but it's also something we signed up for when we enter the industry.

With that said, I totally understand your frustration but with that said let's just complete the deal out of for pay and take this as a learning experience


... my recommendation is to not enter any client servicing industry if you want less stress

positive thinking

I have started a new job about 2-3 weeks ago after coming back to HK and the ride hasn't been smooth. I have been assigned various tasks and my big boss pretty much hasn't been all too happy about my performance each time I gave her my work. While it is understandable for any new hires to learn a new company's system, the feedback I have been getting has been "you need to use your brain / common sense more". For a person who is pretty proud of his intelligence, these past two weeks has been a complete negative reinforcement for my theory - my personal record of most times being called a dumbass was probably broken in the process too.

Now, for those of you who are not too familiar with the Chinese / SE Asia system, bosses / mom & dads basically have a free ticket to yell at you at anytime they want. That has changed recently but the majority of the older generation still beats you down like a dog if you mess up. I was initially pretty thrown off by it to be honest and felt that I was being treated unfairly since a new hire couldn't possibly meet all the expectations set. Then as always, there is always the flip side, where you see the boss who hired me has a legitimate reason to be upset since the things I messed up is considered as common sense to the boss. It is usually a tough boss, not the one who smiles at you after you fxxk up, that trains a good worker. While I really don't have support for this theory, I think this constant push for me to better is a good way for me to get out of my work rust. On top of that, I usually do even better when the pressure is on.

...it would still be nice if some of the criticisms are not as harsh and that my salary is a tad-bit higher

Listen

i really admire those who work a full time job and still manage to have enough brain cells to write a full blog. doesn't their brains get tired from facing a computer all day already? onto today's topic...

Sales is definitely the most important job in mankind's history. Everyone has to be a sales at one point or another, whether it is selling yourself in interviews, selling ideas, products, or even selling you to be someone's boyfriend/girlfriend, but not everyone is a good sales. Confidence, quick thinking, common sense, using your brain, understanding who you are selling to are all basic skills needed to be a good sales.

If it is so easy, then why aren't more people good at being a sales? Confidence comes with knowledge, quick thinking comes from experience, common sense and using your brain can be trained, but understanding who you are selling to is what most people have problem doing. For some, it is because they are too busy trying to convey the message they want to sell and fail to realize what the customer really wants. I am sure everyone has faced this issue one way or another with people who just say what they want to say, argue their points and never compromise. Words go into their ears but not into their brains.

More and more people are like this and this is a trend that doesn't seem likely to change...

P.S. just a follow up to my first sentence, my English really is a lot worse after spending a day working...

A Short Story

A little story to spice up everyone's bump day

Once upon a time, there was a clown.
He laughed, he made people laugh.
He smiled when people were sad, he jumped when people were afraid to.
He wasn't rich, but had enough money to live a fair life.
Then one day, he had a change of heart.
He went to the magician and told the magician that "he had decided to sell his happy self, in exchange for a lifetime's worth of money, to get rich"

Do u see the irony?
Money isn't happiness, for him at least.
The two are complete opposite otherwise there wouldn't be a tradeoff between happiness and money. Yet, he chose money.

...That clown is me

On rumors...

rumors are funny. one of the first that I was ever involved in (10+ years ago) was started because people thought I hated someone that has the same name as me... the funny part comes in when people couldn't tell me why they thought i hated that person or how they came to that conclusion...

case number two... hkmom is close friends with one of the singers from her age. so naturally, hkmom would send her friend some good luck gifts before her concert. the funny part comes in when paparazzi found it newsworthy to use that as a sign for some good lesbian news of 2 fifty year old.

Rumors and gossips have become a big part of everyone's lives... The office (US episode 1 of season 6) actually have an entire episode centered around rumors and gossips... with the focus on what would happen if everyone believed in these rumors. It is a bit sad but everyone just believes rumors and never bother to check and see if they are real - it just seems like these gossip magazines at the newsstand has trained us to believe anything people say, regardless of how silly or untrue the news it. Granted, I am sure that a fair percentage of these gossips are true but would it really be that much of a trouble to double check if what you heard is true? directly from the people involved? and if i deny these rumors, it means its either not your right to know or it really isnt true. I for one dont spend anytime to talk about these rumors... at least not until I have some way or form to confirm it.

it just seems like the world we live in trains us pretty hard to be stupider by the day.

Luck

I guess a small foreword is needed for this topic. It has been a relatively unlucky month for me - my car broke down and needed $11k HKD to fix, my computer broke and needed to hire a guy to recover + fix my comp, then hkgirl has been beating me 5 out of 6 nights on our nightly gambling games... and all these are happening within the week that my credit card paid all the fees from our europe trip and no response from companies. I dont have any official statistics but I am fairly confident that most people would consider this past week of mine a very unlucky week and so did I. I told hkgirl that I need to stop gambling against her because it just reminds me every night at how unlucky I am.

The funny thing is... after not thinking about this for a day, Mr Logic within me started realizing that all these is just a product of my previous actions. Both my car and computer broke down because it didnt start up at all in the past few months and they both die quickly from inactivity. The credit card bill part is bound to happen every month, I cant exactly call one week in every month unlucky just because I have to pay my bill, right?

It is actually quite natural that I have found a logical explanation to my recent occurrences... since I am usually not that superstitious of a person anyway. I like to consider myself 50% logic and 50% romance (or fantasy)... but yea back onto the topic, it seems that many times when good or bad things happen we seem to put too much weigh on luck and ignore the cause of why certain things happen. I mean... if a bird shat on you X times within a day, yea we can call that unlucky, but when there is an obvious cause to why things happen (like my car and computer breaking down), we need to actually look at what made it happen and then learn from it.

NOW... WITH THAT SAID...I still think hkgirl winning my money 5 out of 6 nights is pure luck. Gambling is like 95% luck based and 5% skill based... right??? RIGHT???

P.S. - ...Luck or no luck... I need to stop losing my phone ever 8 months...

Passion, Motivation, and Success

I have been looking for a job ever since I returned to Hong Kong after my MBA. The overall job hunting process is pretty similar to my previous job search - prep CV, find companies to apply, write cover letter, and send them out. In my last 2-3 job searches, I basically just applied anything within the industries that I wish to work for, partly because fresh grads and people with 2-3 years experience doesnt really have much of a choice when it comes to who to work for... its more about who is willing to take you. So with more work experience and a different perspective on life, it is perfectly natural that I am now pickier when it comes to choosing a company that I apply for, with the biggest deciding factor for me right now is how passionate I am about the job, its responsibilities and the industry.

I dont know how much of this is common sense but it never occur to me until recently that passion is such a big factor when it comes to all sorts of things. Motivation can be caused by different reasons, but a person with that "passion fire" inside them will have sustainable motivation. Motivation gives you the energy to finish the goal but passion is a fire that starts from the roots of your emotion. You will go all out and do everything that is possible to succeed if you are passionate about something. To use my own posts as example, the Ants post is a topic that I am truly passionate about whereas the spoiled generation post was just something I was motivated to write, and I will be the first to admit that the quality of the two posts was differrred by the amount of heart I have towards the topic.

While I am not saying that passion = success (brain, experience, and luck matters too), the biggest success cases in this world started from that fire from within (or as Rocky Balboa said in the last Rocky movie "the stuff down the basement".)

...now if only the companies I want to work for accepts me